3D printers printing without consent is a cautionary tale on cloud reliance

Enlarge / Bambu Lab's P1S 3D printer. (credit: Bambu Lab)

Imagine waking in the middle of the night to the sound of your 3D printer, printing away. You know you didn't request a print. In fact, you're sure of it, because your previous project is still on the printer. It sounds like an eerie technological haunting or as if the machines have finally become self-aware. Thankfully, the problem stems from something less creepy but perhaps just as scary: a cloud outage.

As reported by The Verge, on August 15, numerous owners of Bambu Lab 3D printers reported that their device started printing without their consent. It didn't matter if said printing resulted in bent or broken nozzles or other components or if it involved printing a project on top of another. It didn't matter if it was an ungodly time, like 4 in the morning; the printers, which cost anywhere from $599 to $1,449, were printing.

"Started a print @ 11 PM. Time-lapse shows it finish successfully at just before 2 AM. At ~2:30 AM while I slept, the machine started itself again with the last print still on the bed. I see a timestamped time-lapse video that starts at about 2:30 AM," a Reddit user going by u/beehphy complained on the r/BambuLab subreddit.